Board of Directors

Ronald Bianchini, Jr.
President and CEO

As president and chief executive officer of Avere Systems, co-founder Ron Bianchini has a long record of accomplishment in building and leading successful companies that deliver breakthrough technologies. Prior to Avere, Ron was a senior vice president at NetApp, where he served as the leader of the NetApp Pittsburgh Technology Center. Before NetApp, he was CEO and co-founder of Spinnaker Networks, which developed the Storage Grid architecture acquired by NetApp. Ron also served as vice president of product architecture of FORE Systems, where he was responsible for ATM products. Previously, he co-founded Scalable Networks [acquired by FORE], which designed and implemented a large-scale Gigabit Ethernet switch, and earlier in his career, he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ron received a S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds numerous patents in fault-tolerant distributed systems and high-speed network design and has published extensively in technical journals.

John Dean
Chief Financial Officer

In his role of chief financial officer, John leads the company's finance, operations and business development functions. Before joining Avere, John was chief financial officer of Vivisimo, a market-leading enterprise search vendor. At Vivisimo, John led the effort to successfully raise the company's first round of outside capital. Prior to Vivisimo, John was senior director of corporate development at NetApp, where he led the company's OEM relationship with IBM and the company's annual strategy planning process. John served as vice president of finance at Spinnaker Networks where he led the company's finance, accounting and legal functions. John also held various management positions at The Procter & Gamble Company, including associate director of corporate development where he was responsible for M&A activity in the Asia, Paper and Food/Beverage business units.

John holds an M.B.A. from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and a B.A. from Denison University.

Matt brings over 25 years of experience in marketing, product management, engineering, business development, and sales in a wide range of technologies to Norwest Venture Partners. Matt has appeared on the Forbes Midas List as a top 100 investor for three years.

Matt focuses his efforts on mobile, security, rich media, cloud based services/applications, networking and storage sectors. He currently serves on the boards of Avere Systems, Blue Jeans Network, ConteXtream, Exablox, Hadapt, MobileIron, Morta Security and Pertino Networks. He is a board observer at FireEye. Previously, Matt was on the board of Airespace (acquired by Cisco Systems), Omneon (acquired by Harmonic), Reconnex (acquired by McAfee), Retrevo (acquired by Shopzilla), Skystream Networks (acquired by Tandberg Television), SpectraLinear (acquired by Silicon Laboratories), Spinnaker Networks (acquired by Network Appliance), Summit Microelectronics (acquired by Qualcomm), Swan Labs (acquired by F5 Networks) and Webstacks (acquired by Extreme Networks). He was a board observer with Veraz Networks (Nasdaq: VRAZ), Yipes (acquired by Reliance/Flag Telecom) and ZettaCom (acquired by IDT). He previously served on the board of the Wireless Communications Alliance (WCA).

Matt holds a bachelor of business administration, with an emphasis in information systems, and a master of science degree in telecommunications management.

John joined Menlo Ventures in 1985. Over the past 24 years, he has led Menlo's investments in more than 40 portfolio companies, primarily in the communications, storage, semiconductor, Internet and financial technology sectors. His recent investments and board seats include: Aprius, Avere Systems, DiVitas Networks, Librato, Matisse Networks, MotiTV, ParAccel, Parascale, PowerReviews and Zimbio. John was a lead venture investor in the following public companies that achieved successful initial public offerings: Ascend Communications (ASND, now part of Lucent), Cavium Networks (CAVM), Digital Insight (DGIN), FaxSav (EASY), iBasis (IBAS), SpectraLink (SLNK), Syntellect (SXNT, now part of Enghouse Systems) and UUNET Technologies (UUNT, now part of Verizon).

John is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering) and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (M.B.A.). He is a trustee of the Corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the former Chairman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Management Board.

Brian Paul is a managing director of Tenaya Capital. He initially joined the predecessor to Tenaya (Lehman Brothers Venture Partners) in 1999, and co-founded Tenaya in 2009. Previously, Brian worked in Lehman Brothers' Global Technology and Healthcare Investment Banking groups in New York, London and Los Angeles. Within these groups, Brian was responsible for public and private equity offerings as well as strategic advisory assignments. Before joining Lehman Brothers in 1994, Brian was at First Boston, where he was responsible for the purchase and sale of mortgage loan portfolios.

Brian holds an M.B.A. with distinction from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management and a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Bill Chambers
Independent Board Member

Bill Chambers specializes in creating and developing markets for innovative storage technologies. Bill has more than 20 years of executive and management experience at a number of high technology startups and Fortune 500 companies, including serving as the vice president of the LeftHand Networks Division in the HP StorageWorks organization.

He founded and served as the president and CEO of LeftHand Networks prior to its acquisition by HP, leading the company through three rounds of successful venture financing and development of the storage industry's first IP SAN solution. Previous leadership roles included being president and CEO of GE Fanuc Asia Pacific, a joint venture between General Electric Inc. and Fanuc Ltd. of Japan, and sales management positions at Texas Instruments. Chambers currently serves on the Board of Directors at SolidFire, a provider of all-solid-state (SSD) primary storage systems for cloud service providers.

Bill holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering and a certificate of completion from the Stanford University Executive Management Program.